The Maxwell and Epstein Octopus
Why Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself and how Ghislaine Maxwell became the first person ever to be convicted of sex trafficking minors to no one
In order to understand the current thing in the current moment: muckrock.com is an indispensable resource. The very best and most informative starting point, or breadcrumb, on Muckrock is Robert Maxwell and his FBI file and how it keeps getting more classified by the minute. Robert Maxwell was media mogul and the father to a famous daughter by the name of Ghislaine. For those who still can’t keep up Ghislaine’s surname is also Maxwell and she was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking, alongside her accomplice Jeffrey Epstein, who was not only probably not a Hedge Fund manager, but also probably didn’t commit suicide in his prison cell. Details about Epstein as a person are fairly thin on the ground but Eric Weinstein does a great job to share his own experiences with Jeffrey Epstein: The Intelligence Construct.
In order to understand Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s legacy more fully, it is necessary to look past the salacious gossip regarding the ‘Lolita Express’ and Little Saint James ‘Pedo Island’. The background to this story is explained in the book: The Octopus, Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro.
That Chapter is very good YouTube channel, and they deliver a decent synopsis of the book, explaining how and why Danny Casolaro, who investigated the business dealings surrounding a powerful piece of software called PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems) as a freelance journalist, probably didn’t kill himself, just like Jeffrey Epstein probably didn’t kill himself either.
PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems) is explained as thus on Wikipedia:
PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information System) was a case management software developed by Inslaw (formerly the Institute for Law and Social Research), a non-profit organization established in 1973 by Bill and Nancy Hamilton. The software program was developed with aid from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration to aid prosecutors' offices in tracking; in 1982 (by which time Inslaw became a for-profit entity) Inslaw received a $10 million contract by the Justice Department to develop an improved PROMIS application for U.S. attorneys' offices.Having previously developed a 16-bit version of PROMIS, Inslaw developed a 32-bit version, for various operating systems, specifically VAX/VMS, Unix, OS/400, and (in the 1990s) Windows NT.
Inslaw, as a start up, was funded by grants of US Department of Justice and, when ready for production, was sold to the US Department of Justice as a licensed service, on the condition that the government did not modify nor create derivative versions of the software. PROMIS was was the world’s first ‘Big Data’ software, with 570 000 lines of code, was designed to integrate people’s interactions with the legal system from disparate silo-ed databases in the IRS, DoJ, CIA, Attorney General’s Office and so forth. For some perspective on how ahead of its time it was: Palantir use Hyper-Auto as part of their service offering to clients, and it does essentially the same thing.
In 1982 the US Government, via the NSA, misappropriated PROMIS by re-packaging it as a service to banks, with an espionage enabled back door as part of Ronald Reagan’s ‘Follow the Money’ national security initiative. After the early 1980s, Bill Hamilton, PROMIS’ creator and founder, never secured another Federal contract, and his case against the government for stealing his software and violating contractual arrangement was thrown out on ‘technicalities’. But the sale of PROMIS and PROMIS derivatives via the intelligence community and a variety of global ‘movers and shakers’ continued: no longer incentivized by the intellectual property rights of Bill and Nancy Hamilton but a variety of Cold War era security and geo-political concerns. This network of intelligence agents and business people ended up attracting the moniker by investigators and those in the know as ‘The Inslaw Octopus’. The Octopus included Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, arms dealers Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar, Israeli intelligence agent Rafi Eitan (who resigned from his position as head of Lekem as a result of the Jonathan Pollard Affair) as well as British and American intelligence agencies such as the CIA, NSA, MI5 and MI6. In and around this Octopus were the British Royal Family, Dodi Al Fayed (who was allegedly introduced to Princess Diana by the Khashoggi family as a result of the general schmoozing to retain access to Saudi oil in return for British arms) and, essentially, anyone and everyone in business concerned with gaining differential advantage via intelligence gathering and espionage.
At the center of this ‘Inslaw Octopus’ was Robert Maxwell: the father of Ghislaine Maxwell. Via Pergamon International Robert Maxwell sold both computer hardware and software to numerous countries, including the Soviet Union: allegedly, according to an affidavit from Gordon Thomas, including $500 million of PROMIS sales with intelligence agency back doors, in much the same way that the NSA began doing in 1982 when it repackaged PROMIS for the banking industry.
Wired Magazine interviewed Bill and Nancy Hamilton in 1993 and spent years investigating the ‘Inslaw Octopus’ case.
The New Statesman did a retrospective on PROMIS and the Inslaw Octopus in 2011 entitled: ‘Dirtier than Watergate: The Reagan-era espionage system that has managed to stay under the radar.’
PROMIS Software: A Capital as Power Analysis
PROMIS made a great deal of sense as a law enforcement tool for collating data. Without Capitalized Power, law enforcement can’t do their job, and their job and their hierarchy is not motivated by profit, it is motivated by public service to enforce laws. Prior to PROMIS, the ‘Capitalized Power’ of law enforcement was weakened by its available data not being organized in one place, while criminals were able to move through the gaps in law enforcement’s line of sight. After PROMIS law enforcement were better able to prosecute cases against suspects: particularly in cases of corruption and organised crime.
Capitalized Power: automatic collation of all law enforcement data into one readable database, allowing for greater querying capability to spot criminality
Systemic Fear: more prosecutions of a higher success rate as a result of PROMIS’ capabilities means that crime pays substantially less.
Strategic Sabotage: more criminals in prison and less incentive for crime mean that crime itself is undermined.
However the peculiarities of the American government with respect to the use of PROMIS software gave rise to what subsequently became known as the ‘Inslaw Octopus’ and then ultimately, I will argue, the Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein Octopus. Before the advent of the Military Industrial Complex and large scale computing, the competitive nature between the United States’ various agencies prevented pervasive sprawl of government into every day life: government departments and military service branches with similar roles operated to broadly keep each other in check and also to compete for influence and budgets based upon outcomes. This state of flux was broadly creatively destructive and made the United States very adaptable, very wealthy and very powerful. And while Dwight Eisenbower’s warnings about the Military Industrial Complex and John F Kennedy’s warnings about Secret Societies go some way to explaining the Current Thing in the Current Year: a Power Capital Analysis of the ‘Inslaw Octopus’ goes further.
The US Government’s reneging upon its deal with Bill and Nancy Hamilton was the US Government losing control of itself. When Ronald Reagan began his ‘Follow the Money’ agenda with his intelligence apparatus, let’s remember that this is the same Ronald Reagan and the same intelligence apparatus who were responsible for the Iran-Contra Affair. Reaganomics and Thatcherism had, essentially, introduced a business motive and a profit motive into government departments, replacing the old measures of success and the old tacit systems of trust with what we know today as neoliberal ideology: the market knows more than any expert, trust the price not the expert.
Under this Reganite/Thatcherite ideology, intelligence agencies became businesses with an ostensible view to upholding the law. PROMIS delivered unprecedented differential advantage in this new inter-agency ‘Space Race’. The Capital as Power Analysis of PROMIS as a tool for banks with espionage back doors for the NSA becomes, therefore, massively qualitatively different to its intended original design concept. If we start with the value proposition for the banks themselves: the NSA essentially gave the banks a ‘Plata O Plomo’ offer: a cartel offer, and offer too good to refuse.
Capitalized Power: automatic collation of all internal bank data into one readable database, allowing for greater querying capability to analyse risk and determine credit ratings
Systemic Fear: if banks didn’t accept PROMIS, their competitors would undercut them on both breadth and depth of service at any given price, also they would be eternally suspected by law enforcement
Strategic Sabotage: banks that did accept PROMIS could form a oligarchy with NSA backing to put their competition out of business, those that didn’t couldn’t.
And in return for this deal, the NSA had real time access to all bank data from all the most successful and liquid banks in the United States. Such access now is prized by financial institutions, it forms the basis of Robinhood’s business model, forms the basis of Blackrock’s business model: real time market intelligence for high frequency trading.
By creating a derivative of PROMIS for banks, the NSA created enormous differential advantage for itself in the ‘business’ of intelligence. The capitalized power accrued from this usurped both their competition: the CIA, and, crucially, the ability of Bill and Nancy Hamilton to uphold their property rights in court. This marks a key moment in the change of the flavor and quality of Western national security from, even during the Allen Dulles years of Project Paperclip, a matter of pure national power in a global balance of power, to a matter of inter-agency and internecine bourgeois power struggles for differential advantage in a process of accumulated financial power and financial risk management.
As soon as the ‘movers and shakers’ had caught onto what the NSA had done, and had proved concept in, thus began the business model of the ‘Inslaw Octopus’, whereby PROMIS could ensure, via an engineered solution, the ability of the seller to offer a Plata O Plomo’ offer: buy or you will be weakened/destroyed. Thus PROMIS, untethered from licensing constraints, became a national security issue of immense importance due to the autocatalytic sprawl of the mimetic desire of nations and business people to both survive and thrive in the game of capitalistic differential advantage and wealth accumulation. Inslaw Octopus members could engineer deals that buyers couldn’t refuse, and organize the construction of back doors for clients, knowing that buyers were only limited by the least worst seller. The more the Octopus could impose low quality, the better the deal for the members of the Octopus and thus the more they were encouraged to operate as a Cartel or a Mafia.
For understanding cartel economics I strong suggest this lecture on the analysis of De Beers diamond cartel from a Capital as Power perspective by D.T Cochrane, PhD.
For an in depth analysis of Mafia economics I strongly suggest Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate by Diego Gambetta.
Every age is an age of change. This means also change in the social structure of the life of the people. There is never a still or static moment of time. As the time situations develop—there comes new ways of expressing wisdom — new ways of indulging or one might say corrupting people—and new ways of creating a structure for society. So therefore from a Buddhist point of view one sees that the world is not necessarily going to achieve either a Utopian Golden Age or for that matter going to enter a completely Dark Age.
— Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
One fascinating feature of Mafia economics, as explained by Diego Gambetta at length, is that Mafia cinema and how the Mafia tend to operate in real life have a strong tendency to converge over time. Therefore Mafia oriented cinema is actually a Pareto efficiently true to life representation of how the Mafia participate in ‘Human Action’ in order to gain differential advantage within capitalism. The reason that PROMIS software became such an immense national security concern, far beyond the legal concern of Bill and Nancy Hamilton, was because, following the NSA’s 1982 sale of PROMIS to banks, it created brand new ways for the Mafia to lean on the national security apparatus and integrate themselves within the national security apparatus.
Whereby Robert Maxwell engaged in the business of ‘publishing’ to be known as ‘The Publisher’, the Inslaw Octopus created an entirely new form of pernicious social predator, in much the same way that the Former USSR and East Germany did, who dealt purely in Kompromat and putting the lean on those of influence: both to remove those defending proto-capital concerns at the expense of their own and to further their own concerns.
Whereby Robert Maxwell sold and controlled computer software and hardware, academic journals, newspapers and the flow of money and information in the markets therein contained, Ghislaine Maxwell, with the help of Israeli Intelligence construct Jeffrey Epstein, focused purely upon managing the carnal desires of those making the decisions: via Kompromat, blackmail and an endless supply of carnal and material pleasures. They ruled the ‘Libidinal Economy’ surrounding the Inslaw Octopus with a velvet glove and an iron fist.
If there is any remaining doubt that Epstein was an intelligence construct seeking power within essential and necessary aspects of Western economies, look no further than Carbyne, which according to its tagline is a ‘Mission Critical Contact Center Solutions Delivered Globally at Scale.’. Carbyne was originally called ‘Reporty Homeland Security’ when Epstein was a co-founder along with Ehud Barak, former Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Force, and whose Directors, Pinchas Bukhris and Amir Elihai, were commander of IDF Cyber Unit 8200 and Israeli Defence Ministry Director General respectively.
Carbyne is a 911 call handling system for emergency services in the United States. It has established itself as essential software infrastructure, not despite its association with Jeffrey Epstein, the Intelligence Construct, but because of it. Jeffrey Epstein’s entire business model was to put the lean on people in power in order to assume services needed by them and thus make himself indispensable. Whereby Peter Thiel creates need via Christian values, although still somewhat questionable, Jeffrey Epstein created need by pandering to the very lowest desires: sex with children, robbing children of their innocence and robbing those in whom capitalism demands we trust in of their power to say no to Jeffrey Epstein’s demands.
What Eric Weinstein makes clear about Jeffrey Epstein is that he wasn’t stupid and that he reveled in his own sordid glory. Just according to physics it is not possible that Epstein hanged himself from his bunk bed with his paper bed sheets: what is much more likely is that he either a plea bargained for witness protection, he was extracted by Israeli Intelligence in a diplomatic swap deal, or he was murdered in order to silence him and allow companies like Carbyne to keep operating unquestioned.
And likewise this explains why Ghislaine Maxwell’s clients will never be revealed, because to reveal them would be to reveal the putrid underbelly of Western ‘power’ which has, since the NSA’s actions in the 1980s devolved into Kompromat bargaining, hacking brain stems, committing systemic financial fraud, inventing fake crises, zombie businesses, selling blood, keeping babies alive to harvest their organs, an impotent and pathetic NATO, a G7 that has been ostracised by the rest of the world and so forth. For the real story of Ghislaine Maxwell to be revealed would be to reveal that the last half century of ‘Western Freedom and Democracy’ patter has been a lie founded in the most deeply sordid and vile actions by an ‘elite’ that may as well be an eight legged invertebrate born of the depth of the Eighth Circle of Hell, more outraged about Enes Kantor’s choice of shoe than systemic financial fraud, slavery, medical malpractice and child abuse.
TTFN